human beings were created merely to
live surrounded with plenty, blessed with every advantage of worldly
circumstance, and the ties of happy social and domestic relations,--it
cannot be that anybody ought to have all this, and yet do nothing for
it; nor do I believe that any one's duties are bounded by the
half-animal instincts of loving husband, wife, or children, and the
negative virtue of wronging no man: besides we _are_ villainously
wronging many men.... What would I not give to be able to awaken in
others my own feeling of this heavy responsibility!

I have just done reading Dr. Channing's book on slavery; it is like
everything else of his, written in the pure spirit of Christianity, with
judgment, temper and moderation, yet with abundant warmth and energy. It
has been answered with some cleverness, but in a sneering, satirical
tone, I hear. I have not yet read this reply, but intend doing so;
though it matters little what is said by the defenders of such a system:
truth is God, and must prevail.

Enough of this side of the water. Your wanderings abroad, dear H----,
created a feeling of many mingled melancholies in my mind: in the first
place, you are so very, very far off, the dead seem scarcely further;
perhaps they indeed are nearer to us, for I believe we are surrounded by
"a cloud of witnesses." Your description of those southern lands is sad
to me. I have always had a passionate yearning for those regions where
man has been so glorious, and Nature is so still. I thought of your
various emotions at my uncle's grave at Lausanne. Life seems to me so
strange, that the chain of events which forms even the most commonplace
existence has, in its unexpectedness, something of the marvelous.

I rejoice that dear Dorothy is benefited by your traveling, and pray
for every blessing on you both. As to the possibility of my coming to
England and not finding you there, my dear H----; I can say nothing and
you must do what you think right.

God bless you.

I am ever yours,
F. A. B.

[The ideas and expectations, with which I entered upon my Northern
country life, near Philadelphia, were impossible of fulfillment, and
simply ridiculous under the circumstances. Those with which I
contemplated an existence on our Southern estate, or the new one
suggested in this letter, in the State of Alabama, were not only